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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications



is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One	?	: Divine Providence and Social Determinism

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

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A Modern Perspective: Hamlet

By Michael Neill

The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that “if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful.” 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who apparently thought it too dangerous to be performed—but Meyerhold’s sense of Hamlet ’s extraordinary breadth of appeal is amply confirmed by its stage history. Praised by Shakespeare’s contemporaries for its power to “please all” as well as “to please the wiser sort,” 2 it provided his company with an immediate and continuing success. It was equally admired by popular audiences at the Globe on the Bankside, by academic playgoers “in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” and at court—where it was still in request in 1637, nearly forty years after its first performance.

In the four centuries since it was first staged, Hamlet has never lost its theatrical appeal, remaining today the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the same time, it has developed a reputation as the most intellectually puzzling of his plays, and it has already attracted more commentary than any other work in English except the Bible. Even today, when criticism stresses the importance of the reader’s role in “constructing” the texts of the past, there is something astonishing about Hamlet ’s capacity to accommodate the most bafflingly different readings. 3

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Romantic critics read it as the psychological study of a prince too delicate and sensitive for his public mission; to later nineteenth-century European intellectuals, the hero’s anguish and self-reproach spoke so eloquently of the disillusionment of revolutionary failure that in czarist Russia “Hamletism” became the acknowledged term for political vacillation and disengagement. The twentieth century, not surprisingly, discovered a more violent and disturbing play: to the French poet Paul Valéry, the tragedy seemed to embody the European death wish revealed in the carnage and devastation of the First World War; in the mid-1960s the English director Peter Hall staged it as a work expressing the political despair of the nuclear age; for the Polish critic Jan Kott, as for the Russian filmmaker Gregori Kozintsev, the play became “a drama of a political crime” in a state not unlike Stalin’s Soviet empire; 4 while the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney found in it a metaphor for the murderous politics of revenge at that moment devouring his native Ulster:

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections

murders and pieties 5

Even the major “facts” of the play—the status of the Ghost, or the real nature of Hamlet’s “madness”—are seen very differently at different times. Samuel Johnson, for example, writing in the 1760s, had no doubt that the hero’s “madness,” a source of “much mirth” to eighteenth-century audiences, was merely “pretended,” but twentieth-century Hamlets onstage, even if they were not the full-fledged neurotics invented by Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, were likely to show some signs of actual madness. Modern readings, too, while still fascinated by the hero’s intellectual and emotional complexities, are likely to emphasize those characteristics that are least compatible with the idealized “sweet prince” of the Victorians—the diseased suspicion of women, revealed in his obsession with his mother’s sexuality and his needless cruelty to Ophelia, his capacity for murderous violence (he dies with the blood of five people on his hands), and his callous indifference to the killing of such relative innocents as Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ’s ability to adapt itself to the preconceptions of almost any audience, allowing the viewers, in the play’s own sardonic phrase, to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” ( 4.5.12 ), results partly from the boldness of its design. Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy: Hamlet agrees to revenge his father’s death at the urging of the Ghost, and thus steps into an old-fashioned revenge tragedy; but it is Hamlet’s inner world, revealed to us in his soliloquies (speeches addressed not to other characters but to the audience, as if the character were thinking aloud), that equally excites our attention. It is as if two plays are occurring simultaneously.

Although Hamlet is often thought of as the most personal of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare did not invent the story of revenge that the play tells. The story was an ancient one, belonging originally to Norse saga. The barbaric narrative of murder and revenge—of a king killed by his brother, who then marries the dead king’s widow, of the young prince who must pretend to be mad in order to save his own life, who eludes a series of traps laid for him by his wicked uncle, and who finally revenges his father’s death by killing the uncle—had been elaborated in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus, and then polished up for sixteenth-century French readers in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. It was first adapted for the English theater in the late 1580s in the form of the so-called Ur- Hamlet , a play attributed to Thomas Kyd (unfortunately now lost) that continued to hold the stage until at least 1596; and it may well be that when Shakespeare began work on Hamlet about 1599, he had no more lofty intention than to polish up this slightly tarnished popular favorite. But Shakespeare’s wholesale rewriting produced a Hamlet so utterly unlike Kyd’s work that its originality was unmistakable even to playgoers familiar with Kyd’s play.

The new tragedy preserved the outline of the old story, and took over Kyd’s most celebrated contributions—a ghost crying for revenge, and a play-within-the-play that sinisterly mirrors the main plot; but by focusing upon the perplexed interior life of the hero, Shakespeare gave a striking twist to what had been a brutally straightforward narrative. On the levels of both revenge play and psychological drama, the play develops a preoccupation with the hidden, the secret, and the mysterious that does much to account for its air of mystery. In Maynard Mack’s words, it is “a play in the interrogative mood” whose action deepens and complicates, rather than answers, the apparently casual question with which it begins, “Who’s there?” 6

“The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”: Hamlet and Surveillance

The great subject of revenge drama, before Hamlet , was the moral problem raised by private, personal revenge: i.e., should the individual take revenge into his own hands or leave it to God? Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (and, one assumes, his lost play about Hamlet as well) captured on the stage the violent contradictions of the Elizabethan attitudes toward this form of “wild justice.” The surprising thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. Of course, the controversy about the morality of private revenge must have provided an important context for the original performances of the play, giving an ominous force to Hamlet’s fear that the spirit he has seen “may be a devil” luring him to damnation ( 2.2.628 ). But Shakespeare simply takes this context for granted, and goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot—one that may help to explain the paranoiac anxieties it was apparently capable of arousing in a dictator like Stalin.

Turning away from the framework of ethical debate, Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenge to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state. Here too the play could speak to Elizabethan experience, for we should not forget that the glorified monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I was sustained by a vigorous network of spies and informers. Indeed, one portrait of Elizabeth shows her dressed in a costume allegorically embroidered with eyes and ears, partly to advertise that her watchers and listeners were everywhere. Shakespeare’s Elsinore, too—the castle governed by Claudius and home to Hamlet—is full of eyes and ears; and behind the public charade of warmth, magnanimity, and open government that King Claudius so carefully constructs, the lives of the King’s subjects are exposed to merciless inquisition.

It is symbolically appropriate that the play should begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlemented walls of the castle, for nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to go “unwatched”: every appearance must be “sifted” or “sounded,” and every secret “opened.” The King himself does not hesitate to eavesdrop on the heir apparent; and his chief minister, Polonius, will meet his death lurking behind a curtain in the same squalid occupation. But they are not alone in this: the wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare’s chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. Denmark, Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accurately enough, is “a prison” ( 2.2.262 ); and the treachery of these former school friends of Hamlet illustrates how much, behind the mask of uncle Claudius’s concern, his court is ruled by the prison-house customs of the stool pigeon and the informer. How readily first Ophelia and then Gertrude allow themselves to become passive instruments of Polonius’s and Claudius’s spying upon the Prince; how easily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are persuaded to put their friendship with Hamlet at the disposal of the state. Even Laertes’s affectionate relationship with his sister is tainted by a desire to install himself as a kind of censor, a “watchman” to the fortress of her heart ( 1.3.50 ). In this he is all too like his father, Polonius, who makes himself an interiorized Big Brother, engraving his cautious precepts on Laertes’s memory ( 1.3.65 ff.) and telling Ophelia precisely what she is permitted to think and feel:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby. . . .

( 1.3.113 –14)

Polonius is the perfect inhabitant of this court: busily policing his children’s sexuality, he has no scruple about prostituting his daughter in the interests of state security, for beneath his air of senile wordiness and fatherly anxiousness lies an ingrained cynicism that allows him both to spy on his son’s imagined “drabbing” in Paris and to “loose” his daughter as a sexual decoy to entrap the Prince.

Hamlet’s role as hero at once sets him apart from this prison-house world and yet leads him to become increasingly entangled in its web of surveillance. To the admiring Ophelia, Hamlet remains “Th’ observed of all observers” ( 3.1.168 ), but his obvious alienation has resulted in his being “observed” in a much more sinister sense. He is introduced in Act 1, scene 2, as a mysteriously taciturn watcher and listener whose glowering silence calls into question the pomp and bustle of the King’s wordy show, just as his mourning blacks cast suspicion on the showy costumes of the court. Yet he himself, we are quickly made to realize, is the object of a dangerously inquisitive stare—what the King smoothly calls “the cheer and comfort of our eye” ( 1.2.120 ).

The full meaning of that silky phrase will be disclosed on Claudius’s next appearance, when, after Hamlet has met the Ghost and has begun to appear mad, Claudius engages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to probe his nephew’s threatening transformation ( 2.2.1 –18). “Madness in great ones,” the King insists, “must not unwatched go” ( 3.1.203 ):

There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger. ( 3.1.178 –81)

But of course Hamlet’s madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. Forced to master his opponent’s craft of smiling villainy, he becomes not merely an actor but also a dramatist, ingeniously using a troupe of traveling players, with their “murder in jest,” to unmask the King’s own hypocritical “show.”

The scene in which the Players present The Murder of Gonzago , the play that Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap,” brings the drama of surveillance to its climax. We in the audience become participants in the drama’s claustrophobic economy of watching and listening, as our attention moves to and fro among the various groups on the stage, gauging the significance of every word, action, and reaction, sharing the obsessional gaze that Hamlet describes to Horatio:

Observe my uncle. . . . Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And, after, we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming. ( 3.2.85 –92)

“The Mousetrap” twice reenacts Claudius’s murder of his brother—first in the dumb show and then in the play proper—drawing out the effect so exquisitely that the King’s enraged interruption produces an extraordinary discharge of tension. An audience caught up in Hamlet’s wild excitement is easily blinded to the fact that this seeming climax is, in terms of the revenge plot, at least, a violent anticlimax. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had developed the play-within-the-play as a perfect vehicle for the ironies of revenge, allowing the hero to take his actual revenge in the very act of staging the villain’s original crime. Hamlet’s play, however, does not even make public Claudius’s forbidden story. Indeed, while it serves to confirm the truth of what the Ghost has said, the only practical effect of the Prince’s theatrical triumph is to hand the initiative decisively to Claudius. In the scenes that follow, Hamlet shows himself capable of both instinctive violence and of cold-blooded calculation, but his behavior is purely reactive. Otherwise he seems oddly paralyzed by his success—a condition displayed in the prayer scene ( 3.3.77 –101) where he stands behind the kneeling Claudius with drawn sword, “neutral to his will and matter,” uncannily resembling the frozen revenger described in the First Player’s speech about Pyrrhus standing over old Priam ( 2.2.493 ff.). All Hamlet can do is attempt to duplicate the triumph of “The Mousetrap” in his confrontation with Gertrude by holding up to her yet another verbal mirror, in which she is forced to gaze in horror on her “inmost part” ( 3.4.25 ).

Hamlet’s sudden loss of direction after the “Mousetrap” scene lasts through the fourth act of the play until he returns from his sea voyage in that mysteriously altered mood on which most commentators remark—a kind of fatalism that makes him the largely passive servant of a plot that he now does little to advance or impede. It is as if the springing of the “Mousetrap” leaves Hamlet with nowhere to go—primarily because it leaves him with nothing to say. But from the very beginning, his struggle with Claudius has been conceived as a struggle for the control of language—a battle to determine what can and cannot be uttered.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Hamlet and Memory

If surveillance is one prop of the authoritarian state, the other is its militant regulation of speech. As Claudius flatters the court into mute complicity with his theft of both the throne and his dead brother’s wife, he genially insists “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” ( 1.2.44 –45); but an iron wall of silence encloses the inhabitants of his courtly prison. While the flow of royal eloquence muffles inconvenient truths, ears here are “fortified” against dangerous stories ( 1.1.38 ) and lips sealed against careless confession: “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” Polonius advises Laertes, “. . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . reserve thy judgment” ( 1.3.65 –75). Hamlet’s insistent warnings to his fellow watchers on the battlements “Never to speak of this that you have seen” ( 1.5.174 ) urge the same caution: “Let it be tenable in your silence still . . . Give it an understanding but no tongue” ( 1.2.269 –71). What for them is merely common prudence, however, is for the hero an absolute prohibition and an intolerable burden: “. . . break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” ( 1.2.164 ).

Hamlet has only two ways of rupturing this enforced silence. The “pregnant” wordplay of his “mad” satire, as Polonius uneasily recognizes ( 2.2.226 –27), is one way, but it amounts to no more than inconclusive verbal fencing. Soliloquy is a more powerful resource because, since it is heard by no one (except the audience), its impenetrable privacy defines Hamlet’s independence from the corrupt public world. From his first big speech in the play, he has made such hiddenness the badge of his resistance to the King and Queen: “I have that within which passes show” ( 1.2.88 ), he announces. What is at issue here is not simply a contrast between hypocrisy and true grief over the loss of his king and father: rather, Hamlet grounds his very claim to integrity upon a notion that true feeling can never be expressed: it is only “that . . . which passes show ” that can escape the taint of hypocrisy, of “acting.” It is as if, in this world of remorseless observation, the self can survive only as a ferociously defended secret, something treasured for the very fact of its hiddenness and impenetrability. Unlike Gertrude, unlike Ophelia, unlike those absorbent “sponges” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet must insist he is not made of “penetrable stuff.”

If Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is the guardian of his rebellious inwardness, soliloquy is where this inwardness lives, a domain which (if we except Claudius’s occasional flickers of conscience) no other character is allowed to inhabit. Hamlet’s soliloquies bulk so large in our response to the play because they not only guarantee the existence of the hero’s secret inner life; they also, by their relentless self-questioning, imply the presence of still more profoundly secret truths “hid . . . within the center” ( 2.2.170 –71): “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ’t” ( 4.4.46 –49). The soliloquies are the focus of the play’s preoccupation with speaking and silence. Hamlet is set apart from those around him by his access to this region of private utterance: in it he can, as it were, “be bounded in a nutshell and count [himself] a king of infinite space” ( 2.2.273 –74).

Yet there is a paradox here: the isolation of soliloquy is at once his special strength and the source of peculiar anguish. It saves him from the fate of Ophelia, who becomes “Divided from herself and her fair judgment” ( 4.5.92 ) by her grief at Polonius’s death and hasty burial; accustomed to speak only in the voice that others allow her, dutifully resolved to “think nothing, my lord” ( 3.2.124 ), she is left with no language other than the disconnected fragments of her madness to express outrage at a murder which authority seems determined to conceal. Hamlet, by contrast, finds in soliloquy an arena where the unspeakable can be uttered. But the very fact that these are words that others do not hear also makes soliloquy a realm of noncommunication, of frustrating silence—a prison as well as a fortress in which the speaker beats his head unavailingly against the walls of his own cell. Thus the soliloquy that ends Act 2 reproaches itself for a kind of speechlessness—the mute ineffectuality of a “John-a-dreams,” who, unlike the Player, “can say nothing”—and at the same time mocks itself as a torrent of empty language, a mere unpacking of the heart with words ( 2.2.593 –616). For all their eloquence, the soliloquies serve in the end only to increase the tension generated by the pressure of forbidden utterance.

It is from this pressure that the first three acts of the play derive most of their extraordinary energy; and the energy is given a concrete dramatic presence in the form of the Ghost. The appearance of a ghost demanding vengeance was a stock device borrowed from the Roman playwright Seneca; and the Ur- Hamlet had been notorious for its ghost, shrieking like an oysterwife, “Hamlet, revenge!” But the strikingly unconventional thing about Shakespeare’s Ghost is its melancholy preoccupation with the silenced past and its plangent cry of “Remember me” ( 1.5.98 ), which makes remembrance seem more important than revenge. “The struggle of humanity against power,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness”; and this Ghost, which stands for all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius, is consumed by the longing to speak that which power has rendered unspeakable. The effect of the Ghost’s narrative upon Hamlet is to infuse him with the same desire; indeed, once he has formally inscribed its watchword—“Remember me”—on the tables of his memory, he is as if possessed by the Ghost, seeming to mime its speechless torment when he appears to Ophelia, looking “As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors” ( 2.1.93 –94).

For all its pathos of silenced longing, the Ghost remains profoundly ambivalent, and not just because Elizabethans held such contradictory beliefs about ghosts. 7 The ambivalence is dramatized in a particularly disturbing detail: as the Ghost pours his story into Hamlet’s ear (the gesture highlighted by the Ghost’s incantatory repetition of “hear” and “ear”), we become aware of an uncanny parallel between the Ghost’s act of narration and the murder the Ghost tells about:

’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. . . .

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leprous distilment. . . . ( 1.5.42 –71)

If Claudius’s propaganda has abused “the whole ear of Denmark” like a second poisoning, the Ghost’s own story enters Hamlet’s “ears of flesh and blood” (line 28) like yet another corrosive. The fact that it is a story that demands telling, and that its narrator is “an honest ghost,” cannot alter the fact that it will work away in Hamlet’s being like secret venom until he in turn can vent it in revenge.

The “Mousetrap” play is at once a fulfillment and an escape from that compulsion. It gives, in a sense, a public voice to the Ghost’s silenced story. But it is only a metaphoric revenge. Speaking daggers and poison but using none, Hamlet turns out only to have written his own inability to bring matters to an end. It is no coincidence, then, that he should foresee the conclusion of his own tragedy as being the product of someone else’s script: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” ( 5.2.11 –12).

“To Tell My Story”: Unfinished Hamlet

In the last scene of the play, the sense that Hamlet’s story has been shaped by Providence—or by a playwright other than Hamlet—is very strong: the swordplay with Laertes is a theatrical imitation of dueling that becomes the real thing, sweetly knitting up the paralyzing disjunction between action and acting; at the same time, revenge is symmetrically perfected in the spectacle of Claudius choking on “a poison tempered by himself,” Laertes “justly killed with his own treachery,” and the Queen destroyed in the vicious pun that has her poisoned by Claudius’s “union.” Yet Hamlet’s consoling fatalism does not survive the final slaughter. Instead, he faces his end tormented by a sense of incompleteness, of a story still remaining to be told:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,

Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,

Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—

But let it be. ( 5.2.366 –70)

Within a few lines Hamlet’s distinctive voice, which has dominated his own tragedy like that of no other Shakespearean hero, will be cut off in midsentence by the arrest of death—and “the rest is silence” ( 5.2.395 ).

The play is full of such unfinished, untold, or perhaps even untellable tales, from Barnardo’s interrupted story of the Ghost’s first appearance to the Player’s unfinished rendition of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido” and the violently curtailed performance of The Murder of Gonzago. In the opening scene the Ghost itself is cut off, before it can speak, by the crowing of a cock; and when it returns and speaks to Hamlet, it speaks first about a story it cannot tell:

But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy

young blood . . . ( 1.5.18 –21)

Even the tale it is permitted to unfold is, ironically, one of murderous interruption and terrible incompleteness:

Cut off , even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

( 1.5.83 –86)

Act 5 at last produces the formal reckoning of this imperfect account, yet it leaves Hamlet once again echoing the Ghost’s agony of frustrated utterance.

But what, we might ask, can there be left to tell, beyond what we have already seen and heard? It seems to be part of the point, a last reminder of Hamlet’s elusive “mystery,” that we shall never know. The Prince has, of course, insisted that Horatio remain behind “to tell my story”; but the inadequacy of Horatio’s response only intensifies the sense of incompleteness. All that his stolid imagination can offer is that bald plot summary of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters,” which, as Anne Barton protests, leaves out “everything that seems important” about the play and its protagonist. 8 Nor is Fortinbras’s attempt to make “The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for [Hamlet]” ( 5.2.445 –46) any more satisfactory, for the military strongman’s cannon are no better tuned to speak for Hamlet than the player’s pipe.

It would be a mistake, of course, to underestimate the dramatic significance of Horatio’s story or of the “music and the rite of war”—these last gestures of ritual consolation—especially in a play where, beginning with the obscene confusion of Claudius’s “mirth in funeral” and including Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” interment and Ophelia’s “maimed rites,” we have seen the dead repeatedly degraded by the slighting of their funeral pomps. In this context it matters profoundly that Hamlet alone is accorded the full dignity of obsequies suited to his rank, for it signals his triumph over the oblivion to which Claudius is fittingly consigned, and, in its gesture back toward Hamlet’s story as Shakespeare has told it (so much better than Horatio does), it brings Hamlet’s story to a heroic end.

“The Undiscovered Country”: Hamlet and the Secrets of Death

How we respond to the ending of Hamlet —both as revenge drama and as psychological study—depends in part on how we respond to yet a third level of the play—that is, to Hamlet as a prolonged meditation on death. The play is virtually framed by two encounters with the dead: at one end is the Ghost, at the other a pile of freshly excavated skulls. The skulls (all but one) are nameless and silent; the Ghost has an identity (though a “questionable” one) and a voice; yet they are more alike than might at first seem. For this ghost, though invulnerable “as the air,” is described as a “dead corse,” a “ghost . . . come from the grave,” its appearance suggesting a grotesque disinterment of the buried king ( 1.4.52 –57; 1.5.139 ). The skulls for their part may be silent, but Hamlet plays upon each to draw out its own “excellent voice” (“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”; 5.1.77 –78), just as he engineered that “miraculous organ” of the Ghost’s utterance, the “Mousetrap.”

There is a difference, however: Hamlet’s dressing up the skulls with shreds of narrative (“as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone . . . This might be the pate of a politician . . . or of a courtier . . . Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer”; 5.1.78 –101) only serves to emphasize their mocking anonymity, until the Gravedigger offers to endow one with a precise historical identity: “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” ( 5.1.186 –87). Hamlet is delighted: now memory can begin its work of loving resurrection. But how does the Gravedigger know? The answer is that of course he cannot; and try as Hamlet may to cover this bare bone with the flesh of nostalgic recollection, he cannot escape the wickedly punning reminder of “this same skull” that all skulls indeed look frightfully the same. Ironically, even Yorick’s distinctive trademark, his grin, has become indistinguishable from the mocking leer of that grand jester of the Danse Macabre , Death the Antic: “Where be your gibes now? . . . Not one now to mock your own grinning?”; so that even as he holds it, the skull’s identity appears to drain away into the anonymous memento mori sent to adorn “my lady’s” dressing table. It might as well be Alexander the Great’s; or Caesar’s; or anyone’s. It might as well be what it will one day become—a handful of clay, fit to stop a beer barrel.

It is significant that (with the trivial exception of 4.4) the graveyard scene is the only one to take place outside the confines of Claudius’s castle-prison. As the “common” place to which all stories lead, the graveyard both invites narrative and silences it. Each blank skull at once poses and confounds the question with which the tragedy itself began, “Who’s there?,” subsuming all human differences in awful likeness: “As you are now,” goes the tombstone verse, “so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In the graveyard all stories collapse into one reductive history (“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust”; 5.1.216 –17). In this sense the Gravedigger is the mocking counterpart of the Player: and the houses of oblivion that gravediggers make challenge the players’ memorial art by lasting “till doomsday” ( 5.1.61 ). Hamlet shares with the Gravedigger the same easy good-fellowship he extends to the play’s other great outsider, the First Player; but the Gravedigger asserts a more sinister kind of intimacy with his claim to have begun his work “that very day that young Hamlet was born” ( 5.1.152 –53). In this moment he identifies himself as the Prince’s mortal double, the Sexton Death from the Danse Macabre who has been preparing him a grave from the moment of birth.

If there is a final secret to be revealed, then, about that “undiscovered country” on which Hamlet’s imagination broods, it is perhaps only the Gravedigger’s spade that can uncover it. For his digging lays bare the one thing we can say for certain lies hidden “within” the mortal show of the flesh—the emblems of Death himself, that Doppelgänger who shadows each of us as the mysterious Lamord ( La Mort ) shadows Laertes. If there is a better story, one that would confer on the rough matter of life the consolations of form and significance, it is, the play tells us, one that cannot finally be told; for it exists on the other side of language, to be tantalizingly glimpsed only at the point when Hamlet is about to enter the domain of the inexpressible. The great and frustrating achievement of this play, its most ingenious and tormenting trick, the source of its endlessly belabored mystery, is to persuade us that such a story might exist, while demonstrating its irreducible hiddenness. The only story Hamlet is given is that of a hoary old revenge tragedy, which he persuades himself (and us) can never denote him truly; but it is a narrative frame that nothing (not even inaction) will allow him to escape. The story of our lives, the play wryly acknowledges, is always the wrong story; but the rest, after all, is silence.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich , as related to and edited by Solomon Volkow, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Faber, 1981), p. 84.
See F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 435, 209; see also pp. 262 and 403.
The most lucid guide to this critical labyrinth, though he deals with no work later than 1960, is probably still Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1964).
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964).
Excerpt from “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” from Poems, 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Permission for use of these lines from North by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber Limited, is also acknowledged.
See Mack’s classic essay, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502–23; Mack’s approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
The most balanced treatment of this and other contentious historical issues in the play is in Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Introduction to T. J. B. Spencer, ed., Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 52. See also James L. Calderwood’s To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Meta-drama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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Essays About Hamlet: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

To write or not to write? To discover interesting topic ideas for your next essay, see below our round-up of helpful essays about Hamlet and writing topic prompts.

The tragedy of Hamlet , Prince of Denmark, is arguably the most famous work of William Shakespeare – or perhaps in the world of literature. A play revolving around love, betrayal, madness, and revenge, Hamlet is a masterpiece that opens with the murder of the King of Denmark. The ghost of the king will go on to appear before his son Hamlet throughout the play, seeking his help for vengeance by killing the new king, Hamlet’s uncle.

Written from 1600 to 1601 with five acts and published in a quarto edition, Hamlet has since been a beloved on the theatrical stages and modern film adaptations, becoming Shakespeare’s longest play and one of the most quoted in many art forms with its “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

Read on to see our essays and prompts about Hamlet.

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Top 5 Essay Examples

1. ”review: in a powerful ‘hamlet,’ a fragile prince faces his foes” by maya phillips, 2. “the concept of madness in hamlet by shakespeare” by cansu yağsız, 3. “analyzing the theme of religion in william shakespeare’s ‘hamlet’” by journey holm, 4. “ophelia, gender and madness” by ellaine showalter, 5. “the hamlet effect” by holly crocker, 1. the beginnings of hamlet, 2. was hamlet mad or not, 3. physicians’ diagnosis of hamlet, 4. feminism in the eyes of ophelia, 5. religion in hamlet, 6. oedipal complex in hamlet, 7. imageries in hamlet, 8. shakespeare’s language in hamlet, 9. an analysis of “to be or not to be” , 10. hamlet as a philosophical work.

“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip.”

With the many theatrical adaptations of Hamlet, it may be a tall order for production companies to add new flairs to the play while being faithful to Shakespeare’s masterpiece. But Robert Icke, a theater director, stuns an audience with his production’s creative and technical genius, while Alex Lawther, his actor, offers a refreshing, charismatic portrayal of Hamlet.

“The cause of these three characters’ madness are trauma and unrequited love. They also have a spot in common: a devastating loss of someone significant in their lives… In my view, Shakespeare wrote about these characters’ madness almost like a professional about psychology, making the causes and consequences of their madness reasonable.”

Madness is the most apparent theme in Hamlet, affecting the main character, Hamlet, his love interest, Ophelia, and her brother, Laertes. The novel is most reflective of Shakespeare’s attraction to the concept of madness, as he was said to have personally studied its causes, including unrequited love, trauma from losses, and burnout.

“…I will argue that Hamlet’s hesitance to avenge his father’s death comes from something deeper than a meditation on another man’s life, a sort of faith. I will use three scenes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to establish that the reason for Hamlet’s hesitance is religion and the fear of his own eternal damnation in hellfire.”

The essay builds on a pool of evidence to prove the religiousness of Hamlet. But, mainly, the author underscores that it is Hamlet’s religious reflections, not his alleged mental incapacity, that stifle him from performing his duty to his father and killing his murderer.

“Shakespeare gives us very little information from which to imagine a past for Ophelia… Yet Ophelia is the most represented of Shakespeare’s heroines in painting, literature and popular culture.”

The essay walks readers through the depictions of Ophelia in various stages and periods, particularly her sexuality. But the fascination for this heroine goes beyond the stage. Ophelia’s madness in the play has paved the way for constructive concepts on insanity among young women. She has also inspired many artists of the Pre-Rapahelite period and feminists to reimagine Hamlet through the lens of feminism.

“… [A]s the shame-and-troll cycle of Internet culture spins out of control, lives are ruined. Some of these lives are lesser, we might think, because they are racist, sexist, or just unbelievably stupid. Shakespeare’s Hamlet cautions us against espousing this attitude: it is not that we shouldn’t call out inane or wrong ideas… He errs, however, when he acts as if Polonius’s very life doesn’t matter.”

An English professor rethinks our present moral compass through the so-called “Hamlet Effect,” which pertains to how one loses moral standards when doing something righteous. Indeed, Hamlet’s desire for retribution for his father is justifiable. However, given his focus on his bigger, more heroic goal of revenge, he treats the lives of other characters as having no significance.

10 Writing Prompts For Essays About Hamlet

Essays About Hamlet written by Shakespeare

It is said that Shakespeare’s primary inspiration for Hamlet lies in the pages of François de Belleforest’s Histories Tragique, published in 1570 when Shakespeare was six years old. For your historical essay, determine the similarities between Belleforest’s book and Hamlet. Research other stories that have helped Shakespeare create this masterpiece.

Hamlet is the most fascinating of Shakespeare’s heroes for the complexity of his character, desire, and existential struggle. But is Hamlet sane or insane? That question has been at the center of debates in the literary world. To answer this, pore over Hamlet’s seven soliloquies and find lines that most reveal Hamlet’s conflicting thoughts and feelings.

Physicians have long mused over Hamlet’s characters like real people. They have even turned the cast into subjects of their psychiatric work but have come up with different diagnoses. For this prompt, dig deep into the ever-growing pool of psychoanalysis commentaries on Hamlet. Then, find out how these works affect future adaptations in theaters.

Throughout the play, Ophelia is depicted as submissive, bending to the whims of male characters in the play. In your essay, explain how Ophelia’s character reflects the perception and autonomy of women in the Elizabethan era when the play was created. You can go further by analyzing whether Shakespeare was a misogynist trapping his heroine into such a helpless character or a feminist exposing these realities.

Hamlet was written at a time London was actively practicing Protestantism, so it would be interesting to explore the religious theme in Hamlet to know how Shakespeare perceives the dominant religion in England in his time and Catholicism before the Reformation. First, identify the religions of the characters. Then, describe how their religious beliefs affected their decisions in the scenes.

Father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud proposes that Hamlet is hesitant to kill Claudius due to his Oedipus Complex, which grows with him in his adult years. An Oedipus Complex pertains to a male infant’s repressed desire to take possession of his mother from his father, who is viewed as a rival. First, write your analysis on whether you agree with Freud’s view. Then, gather evidence from passages of the play to agree or argue otherwise.

Hamlet in an “inky cloak” to signify his grief, a Denmark under Claudius linked to corruption and disease — these are just some imageries used in Hamlet. Find other imageries and explain how they achieved their dramatic effect on highlighting the moods of characters and scenes.

During Shakespeare’s time, playwrights are expected to follow the so-called Doctrine of Decorum which recognizes the hierarchy in society. So the gravediggers in Hamlet spoke in prose, as Hamlet does in his mad soliloquies. However, Shakespeare breaks this rule in Hamlet. Find dialogues where Shakespeare allowed Hamlet’s characters to be more distinct and flexible in language.

In the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet contemplates suicide. Why do you think these lines continue to be relevant to this day even after centuries since Shakespeare? Answer this in your essay by elaborating on how Hamlet, through these lines, shares the suffering of the “whips and scorns of time” and our innate nature to endure.

In your essay, evaluate the famous philosophies that resound in Hamlet. For example, with the theme of suicide, Hamlet may echo the teachings of Seneca and the movement of Stoicism , who view suicide as freedom from life’s chains. One may also find traces of Albert Camus’s lessons from the Myth of Sisyphus, which tells of a human’s ability to endure.

Interested in learning more? Check out our essay writing tips . If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

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Exploring the evidence that the works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

The Shakespeare Plays / Hamlet

Considered the best work by the best writer, ever!

Whether you like brilliant ruminations on life and death or are more a fan of murder and ghosts and screaming at your mother and insanity and poisonings and stabbings and poisoned stabbings, Hamlet has got it all. And it’s got much much more when seen as the work (and practically the life) of the Earl of Oxford.

What exactly is the Ghost, and from where?

Why does Hamlet wait so long to act?

What drives Ophelia insane?

The main themes of Hamlet include

Rashness vs. Thinking

Plot Summary

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a tragedy that delves into themes of treachery, revenge, moral corruption, and the nature of existence and of death. The play is set in Denmark and follows the story of Prince Hamlet.

The play opens with the ghost of King Hamlet appearing to guards at Elsinore Castle. The ghost reveals to his son, Prince Hamlet, that he was murdered by his brother, Claudius, who has now taken the throne and married Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The ghost urges Hamlet to avenge his death.

Hamlet feigns madness to investigate and plots to kill Claudius. His erratic behavior confuses and alarms those around him, including his girlfriend Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, the lord chamberlain. Polonius believes Hamlet’s madness is due to his love for Ophelia. Hamlet often reveals his torment in eloquent soliloquies.

Hamlet stages a play, “The Mousetrap,” enacting his father’s murder to provoke an expression of guilt from Claudius. Claudius’s reaction confirms his guilt to Hamlet, who decides to kill him. However, Hamlet hesitates and misses his chance, killing Polonius instead by mistake when he hides behind a curtain.

Ophelia, stricken by her father’s death and Hamlet’s behavior, descends into madness and drowns. Her brother Laertes returns to Denmark to avenge Polonius’s death. Hamlet returns from exile in England and confronts actual death in a graveyard and Ophelia’s funeral. Laertes conspires with Claudius to kill Hamlet in a rigged duel. They plan to poison the tip of Laertes’s sword and prepare a poisoned drink for Hamlet.

During the duel, both Hamlet and Laertes are wounded by the poisoned sword. Queen Gertrude accidentally drinks the poisoned wine and dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reveals Claudius’s plot. Enraged, Hamlet finally kills Claudius.

Hamlet, dying from the poison, names Fortinbras of Norway as his successor. The play ends with Fortinbras arriving to take control of Denmark and ordering a military funeral for Hamlet.

Hamlet can be dated between 1586 when all the major sources were available and 1602 when it was entered in the Stationers’ Register.

What works inspired the author of Hamlet ?

The “Ur-Hamlet” (c. 1589). A mythical early Hamlet play for which there is no direct evidence. Its existence was created by orthodox scholars to explain away “too-early” references to the Shakespeare play.
The Precepts of William Cecil, Lord Burghley . A private collection of aphorisms from a father (William Cecil, Lord Treasurer of England) to his son which provided inspiration for “To thine own self be true” and other famous lines from the play.
The life of Edward de Vere. Events such as the death of his father and “hasty” remarriage of his mother, the relationship with William Cecil who was the model for Polonius, the pirate attack and numerous other references closely follow instances in de Vere’s life.

Act by Act Analysis and more evidence for Oxford's authorship

Michael Delahoyde, Hamlet , Overview and Act by Act. Visit the website of Professor Michael Delahoyde, host of our series, for an act by act analysis and full treatment of Oxfordian themes in the play, plus a filmography and more.

Learn more!

Eddi Jolly – “Dating Shakespeare’s Hamlet .” The Oxfordian 2 (1999): 11-23.

Eddi Jolly – “The Tragedy of Hamlet.” In Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s . Ed. Kevin Gilvary. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 379-395.

Earl Showerman – “Orestes and Hamlet: From Myth to Masterpiece, Part I.” The Oxfordian 7 (2004): 89-114. [“Part II” unpublished.]

Richard Whalen – Hamlet’s Sources and Influences, and Its “Forerunners” by Oxford. Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter: Vol. 54/1 (Winter 2018), 1, 19-31.

Christopher Paul – Oxford, Hamlet, and the Pirates: the naked truth. Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter: Vol. 40/1: 01-5 (2004, Winter).

Tom Regnier – The Law in Hamlet: Death, Property, and the Pursuit of Justice. Brief Chronicles, v. 3 (2011).

Ren Draya – The Three Queens of Hamlet. Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter: Vol. 54/1 (Winter 2018), 32-36.

Yambert, Karl – “Oxford’s Bible and Hamlet’s Biblical Allusions.” The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 60.2 (Spring 2024): 15-24.

Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon . Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 195-200.

Gontar, David P. “Hamlet Made Simple.” In Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays . Nashville: New English Review Press, 2013. 377-415. Gontar focuses on Hamlet’s possible doubt about his own paternity: Claudius? Might explain much.

Beauclerk, Charles. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom . NY: Grove Press, 2010.

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186 Hamlet Essay Topics & Thesis Ideas

We know how long students search for interesting Hamlet essay topics. In this post, you will find a list of the most debating Hamlet essay titles and thesis ideas. We’ve also developed a guide on how to write a Hamlet paper and included some helpful Hamlet essay examples.

👍 Hamlet Essay Writing – Tips & Ideas

🏆 best hamlet essay examples, 📜 hamlet research paper topics & thesis ideas, 📌 catchy hamlet essay titles, 🌟 best hamlet thesis ideas, 🔍 easy hamlet essay topics, ⁉️ research questions about hamlet, ❓ hamlet essay questions.

Here, at IvyPanda, we know how daunting can be the task of writing a Hamlet Essay. In this post, you will find out how to write a paper that would get top marks.

Tip #1. Read critically before starting hamlet essay outline

Critical reading will help you to prepare for writing your paper. There are a lot of techniques that can increase your reading speed. You may try some of them, described below:

Highlighting

Grab a few highlighters and use them to underline things that might suit for various topics. For example, use green when you see something pertaining to a tragic hero character analysis; pink for a particular symbol, etc. Don’t forget to make a key, so you know what each color means.

This method helps you to organize your evidence and allows you to see if you have enough support to write your essay.

Note-taking

Take notes and record your ideas and critical aspects while reading the plot. This approach will help you to avoid multiple re-readings. However, be sure to remark what part of the essay your notes pertain to.

Making annotations in the margins of the book, you will ensure that you understand what is happening in a text after you’ve read it. Note the author’s key points, central areas of focus, and your thoughts.

Annotating will help you to summarize, highlight crucial pieces of information, and prepare yourself for writing Hamlet essay prompts that your professor may give you

You can use the methods mentioned above or try any other, or even come up with your own technique. This simple exercise will help you to recall which points to write about in your paper.

Tip #2. Write a detailed outline

Now, when you’ve done the prewriting work, it’s time to focus on what you’re going to write in and create your Hamlet essay outline.

Here’s the trick: the more detailed your outline will be, the less time you will spend on the writing process. If you put a lot of detail in the outline, all you will have to do is connect arguments and make it readable.

If you have to turn in a formal outline, as part of your essay, check that each level has at least two parts.

Tip #3. Write your Hamlet essay thesis statement

A thesis statement is among the crucial parts of your entire essay. It tells your readers what you will write in the rest of the paper. It should correspond with the essay title and act as a short preview of the assignment.

You will bring up may points in the paper, although the thesis should tie all of them together.

Write your Hamlet essay thesis statement during outlining and refine it when you start writing. It is possible to revise it when the essay is already finished, and you see ways to improve the thesis.

Tip #4. Start writing your Hamlet essay

When you begin to write an essay, you can check available samples and titles to get inspiration. However, make it personal. Ask yourself questions.

Here are some question examples: What interests me about the play? Is it Hamlet’s monologues? Is it the figure of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father? Or is it something even more obscure?

If you are still struggling to find your Hamlet essay topics or ideas to add to the paper, check these free samples of high-quality papers!

Why Is Hamlet a Complex Character: Critical Analysis When Hamlet’s father requests him to avenge his death against King Claudius, he is unable to carry out his revenge. In addition, Shakespeare mission to delay Hamlet’s plan to avenge his father’s death highlights the […]
A Critical Analysis of Hamlet’s Constant Procrastination in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Claudius is successful in his ambition and Hamlet is left with the decision on whether or not to kill his uncle so as to avenge his father’s death.
Hamlet’s Relationship with His Mother (Gertrude) – Attitude Towards Her The conversation between Hamlet and his mother brings back Gertrude to her senses where she feels guilty and ashamed of her actions.
Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras: Revenge for the Deaths of Their Fathers He thinks about the fact that revenge is not a good action to make his soul get to heavens. His is a prince of Norway, but likewise Hamlet did not receive the crown, he was […]
Hamlet vs. Oedipus Compare and Contrast Essay In his speech to his brother-in-law Creon, the proud king voices the desire to find the murderer to secure not only the wellbeing of his state but his safety as a ruler as well.
Resilience of Hamlet and Oedipus The plot of the tragedy of Sophocles is built on a chain of accidents, which are in fact the fatal will of the powerful gods.
Shakespeare: Hamlet The scene that is the subject of this report refers to a scene in the play that takes place at the graveyard following the death of Ophelia.
Hamlet’s Attitude Toward Women in Shakespear’s “Hamlet” The event that gives birth to his hatred is Gertrude’s marriage to her brother-in-law Claudius very soon after the untimely death of her husband, King Hamlet.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: The Use of Allusion and Metaphors Shakespeare’s use of allusion and metaphors in Hamlet is vital to creating the dramatic imagery surrounding the play and foreshadowing the extent of the growing conflict.
Gertrude’s Character in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare However, in the second part of the play, when Gertrude faces the truth of her first husband’s dead, she immediately stands a reformed character, sympathetic to Hamlet’s cause.
William Shakespeare: Hamlet and Macbeth It is important to examine the role that the setting plays in Hamlet and Macbeth in relation to the tragic flaw and developments of the plot.
Literary Analysis of “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare They are the symbolic image of Hamlet’s father the ghost of the King, the flowers and Ophelia, the skull, and the grave of Yorick.
Blindness in Oedipus Rex & Hamlet Therefore, in this play, the sighted like Oedipus and Jocasta are ‘blind’ to the truth whilst the blind like Teiresias can see the truth.
Comparison of “Hamlet”, “King Lear” and “Othello” by Shakespeare Iago’s reports and the loss of the handkerchief appear to Othello reliable proofs of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, and under the effect of anger the protagonist is both unable and unwilling to do further investigation.
Psychoanalytic Study of Hamlet by Ernest Jones (Critical Writing) I agree with the author regarding the dialogues, the flow of the play, and the sequence of the events in it.
Father-Son Relationships in Hamlet – Hamlet’s Opinion In the case of Hamlet, he surrenders his own life and future to the will of his father, albeit following significant hesitation, not to mention the passage of an entire play.
Hamlet Analysis Essay: Shakespeare’s Play Analysis Example The writer used the name of the play as the name of the main actor while other characters in the play helped in development of the predominant theme in the main character.
“Hamlet and His Problems” by Thomas Stearns Eliot Hamlet assumes the role of both the father and the son and the need to detect his identity about his idea of the father becomes problematic in the presence of his mother.
Hamlet & Laertes: Fathers’ Death Reactions King Hamlet’s ghost then informs prince Hamlet of the person who killed him; consequently, Hamlet accepts the ghost’s demands, swears his accomplices to secrecy and reveals to them his intention of killing the king to […]
“Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” The link of “Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” to the present days can be seen in the lost characters.
Shakespeare versus Olivier: A Depiction of ‘Hamlet’ The presentation of the Ghost in the film builds the main theme of revenge and tragedy. Olivier shows that the Oedipus complex is a crucial aspect in understanding the play especially the character of Hamlet […]
Creative Process in William Shakespeare Works Creativity in his works, Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, is portrayed by the manner he makes choice of characters, the way themes are tied up with stylistic language to reflect hidden meanings reflective of the […]
Lying, Acting, Hypocrisy in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” This paper will argue that, although the concepts of hypocrisy, lying, and acting are brought up directly only a few times in Hamlet, the manifestations thereof can be found throughout the poem, the Dutch prince […]
Hamlet and King Oedipus Literature Comparison This essay compares the characters and roles of both Hamlet and King Oedipus as the sons who have to deliver justice to their fathers’ killers.
The Theme of Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet The latter, after seeing his father’s ghost and learning the truth, feels that he is taken over by revenge and sets up a performance that copies Claudius’s, the murderer’s, plan and results in a tragic […]
Characterization of Hamlet When Hamlet learns in a dream that he is supposed to revenge the death of his father, he promises to do so “with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep […]
Minor Characters in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Some of the stories that the reader comes to know, about some people or events in the play, come inform of narrations from the minor characters. The minor characters give most of the information known […]
Hamlet’s Choice of Fortinbras as His Successor Choice of Fortinbras is an act to usurp his place as the rightful king and avenge for the injustice done to Fortinbras, as well as him. Another reason could be an act to reconcile with […]
Hamlet in the Film and the Play: Comparing and Contrasting There is a certain discrepancy in the way Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Gibson’s hero unveil the tragic style of the play. This assumption is justified by the scenes from the movie because many of the dialogues […]
Role of Women in Twelfth Night and Hamlet by Shakespeare Purpose of the research The purpose of this study is to compare specific women characters in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Hamlet and to explore their similarities in terms of their passivity, relationships with other characters […]
Education and Knowledge in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare Shakespeare portrays that in a world of complexity, instability, and unpredictability, people are struggling to make sense of the changes and to situate themselves within the new milieu.
Horatio (Hamlet): Character Analysis Hamlet does not follow his friend’s caution and goes with the ghost, where he learns of his father’s murder and swears to avenge him.
The Idea of Insanity in “Hamlet” He is maybe a bit spoiled and used to getting his own way, but he knows he has a duty to the state and to his family and he knows he is destined to someday […]
Elements of Literature Used in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The audience may be able to show a degree of empathy with Hamlet as the play was written in a slightly satirical manner and shows that he is very much human in his qualities and […]
“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be It begins with supernatural such as the presence of the ghost and Hamlet attempting to glance into Claudius’ soul, to the mystery of the crime and the need for revenge. The masterful use of style, […]
Hamlet’s Parental Relationships The death of his father, the actions of his mother and his existing relationship with his uncle all have Hamlet confused regarding the true nature of the world.
Canonical Status of Hamlet by William Shakespeare However, the technique has been defended by some of the scholars who argue that Shakespeare’s skill is to develop and emphasize the purpose of duality and dislocation in the play.
“The Lion King” Movie as Adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The film parallels Hamlet as the main characters in the play and the film are both princes, and the antagonists are uncles who murder their brothers to gain power.
Hamlet’s Renaissance Culture Conflict The death of Hamlet as the play ends indicates that though he was the definite answer to all the questions before him as he faced death, he was not in any position to give any […]
Themes in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare With consideration of critical responses, use of language and structure, and through a close analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquies, the role of Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet in shaping the enduring power of the text is appreciated […]
Key Themes in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare Among the characters in this play include Claudius, hamlet, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Horatio, Laertes, Voltimand, Rosencrantz, Osric, ghost of Hamlet’s father, Barnardo to mention but a few Mystery of death is one theme that clearly […]
The Play “Hamlet Prince of Denmark” by W.Shakespeare Hamlet, a Denmark Prince, is the main character in the play. In the climax of the play, Claudius appears to be responsible for the death of King Hamlet.
“The Prince” by Machiavelli and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare The author tries to bring to light the concepts of life when he uses the different aspects of death in the piece of work.
Hamlet And Laertes: A Comparison Hamlet, shocked by the revelation and shaken to the core by the knowledge of his mother’s role in the act, immediately makes his intention clear in the presence of the ghost.
The Function of the Soliloquies in Hamlet This happens when it influences the plot, the characterization in the play, and the play’s mood, on top of expressing themes that could be termed to be the main themes.
Hamlet’s Hesitation in Revenge: Four Separate Theories The play within a play is one of many tactics Hamlet employs over the course of the play to delay the revenge and therefore avoid his own death.
William Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Actions and Inactions This paper is an attempt to analyze Hamlet’s actions and inactions to prove the authenticity of the application of these maxims to the protagonist.
Appearance vs. Reality in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” In preparing for the performance, Hamlet provides the players with specific lines and actions to include within the overall play they are about to perform and gives them lengthy instructions as to the acting of […]
William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Drama Play These soliloquies are dramatic and ironical, Harold Wilson submits, with an irony that is implicit and eloquent in the extravagances of Hamlet’s rhetoric.
The Importance of Paintings in Hamlet The play revolves around the two opposing forces: truth and deceit, and we see a contrast between the importance of being true to one’s self and the importance of being truthful with others.
The Hamlet’s Emotional Feelings in the Shakespearean Tragedy The grief that Hamlet feels at the death of his father is tempered by a Claudius’s statement to him that grief is ‘unmanly.’ He also associates women with deception beginning with his mother with whom […]
“Hamlet the Prince of Denmark” by William Shakespeare The first one is the plot of the play that lasts from the beginning till the scene when Hamlet meets the ghost of his father.
Human Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy “Hamlet” Soliloquies maintain significant place in the play Hamlet, which start with the beginning of the play, and chase the protagonist almost near the close of the end of the play.
Depression and Melancholia Expressed by Hamlet The paper will not attempt and sketch the way the signs or symptoms of depression/melancholia play a part in the way Shakespeare’s period or culture concerning depression/melancholia, but in its place portrays the way particular […]
Hamlet and Forgiveness: A Personal Reflection Some of the most prominent themes in the story are the ideas of mutual forgiveness, people’s motivation to be proactive and take risks, and their willingness to forgive and ask for forgiveness.
“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: Overview In the play Hamlet is a noble soldier with admirable qualities but he avenges the death of his father using his free will.
The Reflection of Time in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare Thesis Human existence and purpose of life were considered unimportant because the human soul had a divine nature, thus, they were afraid of death as an unknown state of human existence.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the “Hamlet” Hamlet is a son to the former King and a nephew to the current King Claudius These two characters seem indispensable throughout and serve as informants of Claudius. In the play, they fit in as […]
Anti-Heroism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cervantes’ Don Quixote This ghost will only talk to Hamlet, and when the time is right, he will share his side of the account with the prince.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as the Central Tragedy for Revenge Understanding The core concept of revenge in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play, is the hesitation of the main character and his doubt moral and philosophical maxims in the whole world; the main idea of the play may be […]
Protagonist in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” The Protagonist plays a major part to achieve the goals of the story while the antagonist is an adversary who struggles against the efforts of the protagonist.
Ophelia from Shakespeare’s ”Hamlet” Shakespeare employs the traditional view of the woman as a means of illustrating its more dangerous elements through his portrayal of Ophelia in her innocence, the ease with which others use her, and the suspicion […]
The Issue of Human Manipulation in ‘Hamlet’ by W. Shakespeare It seems the love he contains in his heart is not enough for him to forgive and forget what has happened.
Macbeth and Hamlet Characters Comparison The queens in Hamlet and Macbeth play a pivotal role in the life of the heroes of the play. She is portrayed as a mother who, in her awareness of Hamlet’s crisis, feels guilty and […]
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and the Modern World The tragedy of Hamlet addresses eternal problems: the incompatibility of lofty ideals and dreams with reality, the mismatch between the goals and the means of achieving them, and the role of the individual in history.
Shakespearean Hamlet’s Character Interpretation For example, Hamlet believed that his mother was loyal to his father and to the kingdom, but he felt unhappy with how events unfolded when grieving.
The Character of Gertrude in ‘Hamlet’ The character of Ophelia is responsible for projecting an aura of guilt and deception to the role of women in ‘Hamlet.’ She is not treacherous or complicated, but instead weak and insensibly dependent on the […]
Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet One such device in Hamlet is Shakespeare’s placing of the Danish prince in the context of Fortinbras and Laertes as the characters that, like Hamlet, find themselves in the role of having to avenge their […]
Act 1 Scene 2 of the “Hamlet” Play by Shakespeare The use of honorifics, stichomythia, and imagery is discussed, as well as the aside, the motif of spying, and the overall mood of the scene will be discussed and evaluated. The overall mood of the […]
Resiliency in Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet According to the information provided the reader rises with the question dealing with the resiliency of both Hamlet and Oedipus and what does it mean to them.
Hamlet: A New Type of Independent Thinker Hamlet considers the plan to disturb Claudius and convince the audience of his guilt distracting attention from prayer and confession. Such innovations permeate the entire text, which allows the reader to assert that Hamlet did […]
Hamlet’s Descent Into Darkness: A Tale of Revenge, Death, and Uncertainty Hamlet was thinking about the afterlife and suicide to achieve peace, and during this speech, a reader might feel the pain and despair of the main character.
Hamlet vs. Oedipus Rex: Who Is More Resilient? In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus is a protagonist; he is seeking the truth and is unconcerned about the harm it may pose.
Reality and Illusion in Shakespeare’s Hamlet The last and the greatest deceiving character is Claudius, who is far from being the brave brother of the monarch who ascended to the throne in order to protect the kingdom. It is evident that […]
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: Hamlet as a Masculine Character Initially, the themes and scenes of the play were designed for staging at the Shakespeare theatre, and the costumes and the actors’ play were supposed to evoke awe for the rich life of medieval nobles.
Hamlet’s Mental State and Issues That Affected Him To begin with, it is evident to the reader that the main character is overwhelmed by the grief and mourning of his father.
Coping With Changes in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and O’Connor’s “A Good Man…” Tragedies in “Hamlet” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” lead characters to rely on the change as a coping mechanism.”Hamlet” narrates the story of an individual dealing with a loss which leads him […]
“The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” and “A Raisin in the Sun” In this regard, the decisions of Hamlet, Claudius, Walter, and Lena illustrate the character’s commitment to family despite differences of opinion and disagreements.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Play: Then and Now Hamlet’s cynicism, as well as his sense of meaning, distinguish him as a uniquely contemporary figure and a watershed moment in the theatrical past.
Does Shakespearean Hamlet Love Ophelia? The love that Hamlet has for Ophelia is demonstrated in letters that he wrote to her. Hamlet reminds Ophelia that he is in love with her in the later stages of Act 3 of the […]
Hamlet and Gertrude Relationships in Shakespeare’s Play However, even though Hamlet threatens to murder Gertrude to “wring” her heart, the audience can understand that he loves his mother and wants her to repent of her sins and end the relationship with Hamlet’s […]
Power and Importance of Hamlet’s Role in Shakespeare’s Play The first striking problem of Hamlet is the one of choice, which may be considered a reflection of the main conflict of the tragedy.
Deceiving Appearances in “Hamlet” and “The Lion King” In particular, Claudius and Scar represent villains under the guise of well-wishers, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet and hyenas from The Lion King appear worse than they seem.
Gender Roles and Representation of Women in “Hamlet” Specifically, the author refers to the problem of being confined in the prison of gender stereotypes that can be experienced when reading Shakespeare’s works.
Consideration of the Ghost in “Hamlet” by Shakespeare The Ghost in the play is charitable because it helps Hamlet to know the truth about the way his father died and to begin finding clues for the murder.
Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet Really Crazy? According to the first one, Hamlet pretends to be mad, so that he is not taken seriously and is not considered as dangerous, under the guise of a madman, he can say anything.
Oedipus and Hamlet Characters’ Contrast and Comparison The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast one of the main characters of literature – Oedipus and Hamlet, as well as to determine the qualities and skills of people which make them […]
“Oedipus King” by Sophocles and “Hamlet” by Shakespeare The protagonist is on the verge of madness: an intelligent and unexcelled humanist in the world, which is an enemy to his ideas. However, Oedipus later comes to terms with his fate and takes responsibility […]
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A Play “Hamlet” by William Shakespear Hamlet decides to prove whether Claudius really killed his father and in act three, he uses the play “The Murder of Gonzago” to get the truth.
Recurring Theme of Revenge in Hamlet On top of this, Laertes wants to revenge the insanity and subsequent death of his sister, which he blames on Hamlet.
In Hamlet, act 1, scene 2, which dramatic convention does Shakespeare employ most?
Which statement best describes why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a complex character?
Which line would most likely be written by a reader analyzing Hamlet through the formalist lens?
Do you think Hamlet is a problem play or a tragedy? Why?
How perennial issues of the human condition are imaged in Hamlet?
Which best describes a change an adaptation would make if Hamlet was set in modern times?
If Shakespeare kills the character of Hamlet, what dramatic convention would he be using?
Which theme in Hamlet is reinforced by the scene with the Gravediggers?
How do the actors’ physical appearances affect their adaptations of Hamlet?
Why did Shakespeare choose loyalty and betrayal as lead themes in Hamlet?
Which statement best explains why Hamlet alludes to Pyrrhus throughout act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet?
When Polonius says, “brevity is the soul of wit,” why is it ironic?
What does Hamlet mean when he refers to the “pangs of dispriz’d love”?
What is corruption and how its rampant impact is depicted in Hamlet?
Which statement best describes why King Claudius is a complex character in act 3 of Hamlet?
What is Hamlet’s concluding thought after he has mused over the skulls and the idea of death?
What does Marcellus’s and Horatio’s characterization of the ghost imply?
How does Shakespeare use conflict in Hamlet as a way of exploring ideas?
What excerpt from act 3 of Hamlet supports the conclusion that Hamlet is critical of women?
Where does Claudius send Cornelius and Voltimand? Why?
How does the play-within-a-play in act 3 of Hamlet represent Elizabethan drama?
Which statement best describes Gertrude’s development between act 1 and act 4?
Which statement best describes Laertes’s development between act 1 and act 4?
How does Shakespeare present women and sex in Hamlet?
Which passage from Hamlet, act 2, scene 1 is an example of setting?
What line from act 3 of Hamlet supports the conclusion that Claudius fears his own fate?
What’s the meaning behind “…for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” in act 2, scene 2?
Which detail in Hamlet best reflects the time the play was written in?
In what sense is Hamlet wrong in his plotting against and killing of Claudius and in what sense he is not?
Which excerpt from Hamlet, act 1, scene 1 is a stage direction?
What are the inward and outward conflicts in Hamlet?
Why does Polonius think Hamlet is mad?
What is “get thee to a nunnery” meaning?
Why is the ending of Hamlet ironic?
What is Hamlet’s opinion about theater?
Why does Hamlet act crazy?
What best describes Hamlet’s view of death?
Which words best describe Gertrude in act 4 of Hamlet?
What conflict(s) does Hamlet experience inside himself?
What does Hamlet teach us about humanity?
Why is Reynaldo obligated to follow Polonius’s instructions?
What does Hamlet mean by “shuffled off this mortal coil”?
Why does Hamlet kill Polonius?
What best describes how Laertes feels about his father’s death?
Which word best describes Laertes in act IV of Hamlet?
What advice does Polonius give Laertes?
Which Word does Hamlet use to describe those who choose to live?
What was the “moment of final suspense” in Hamlet?
Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet based on a true story?
Why did Hamlet choose not to kill Claudius when he was praying?
What plot event prompts Hamlet to become suspicious and resentful?
What are examples of dramatic irony in Hamlet?
What incident serves to initiate the conflict in Hamlet?
Which details in Hamlet reflect Elizabethan society?
How is Laertes a foil for Hamlet?
What is the the meaning of soliloquy in Hamlet?
What words suggest that Claudius plans to control Hamlet?
What does the first soliloquy reveal about Hamlet?
What does the Ghost tell Hamlet?
Why does Polonius send Reynaldo to Paris?
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Madness in Shakespeares Hamlet

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